Conventionally, large self-service stores inform customers of particularly attractive offers, special sales, new products, and so forth, by centrally controlled announcements over loudspeakers distributed throughout the store. These loudspeaker announcements are often continuously repeated in the same order and over a period of time to the point that they annoy customers who become resistant to purchase of the items being announced.
Further, some stores also use transmitters in departments that are to be supplied with specific information for that particular department. From these transmitters, the information intended for the particular department is transmitted wirelessly to receivers that are housed on all the system shopping carts in the store. The information received is then acoustically reproduced over loudspeakers and/or shown on relatively large screens, which are likewise provided on the system shopping carts and are connected to the receivers on the system shopping carts. However, when customers stopping in one department are subjected to information announced over the system shopping cart loudspeaker specific to another department, they can be just as annoyed as by central loudspeaker announcements.
Further, when screens are attached near the pushbars of the system shopping carts, their size can be a nuisance, on the one hand; on the other, the equipment for triggering the screen and supplying it with the requisite energy requires considerable space, thereby restricting the already relatively limited space in the system shopping cart.
Conventionally, data required to prepare a so-called customer route study have been collected by surveillance of a significant number of persons over a prescribed period of time, either by observing or polling individual customers. These studies make it possible to determine, for instance, preferred customer routes through the self-service store; whether the customer will frequent, or has frequented, certain so-called service shops; how long the customer stays in different departments; and so forth. The facts gained by observation or polling are then recorded on prepared questionnaires or in table form, or dictated onto tape, for example.
Preparing for and carrying out such studies in the form of observations, polling and the like, are not only extremely time-consuming and thus labor-intensive, but in such polls of customers, one must also depend very heavily on the good will and cooperation of the individual customer and on his/her readiness to answer the questions asked with accuracy and detail. Despite the heavy expenditure of time and labor needed, the facts and results obtained in this way still have a variable amount of intrinsic uncertainty; the customer route study to be prepared, or prepared later, therefore necessarily often produces incorrect results that do not fully correspond to actual facts.